Anita Dunn and Bob Bauer. Dunn was a heavy hitter in the Obama campaign and now does consulting, Bauer practices election law.
Linda Davidson | The Washington Post | Getty Images
For more than three decades, Bob Bauer and Anita Dunn have climbed to the summit of Washington power.
Bauer, the personal lawyer to President Joe Biden who served as White House counsel under President Barack Obama, is the godfather of Democratic election lawyers. Dunn, an adviser to Biden in the White House who was communications director under Obama, is the city’s grand dame of public relations.
Since early November, they have been at the center of Biden’s strategy for handling the discovery of classified documents among his papers from past jobs. That strategy kept the story hidden from the public for more than two months, demonstrating the tension between the areas in which Bauer and Dunn, respectively, are Biden’s most trusted advisers: law and public relations. And it is a rare moment that has shined a light on a power pair that usually operates behind the scenes with little fanfare and even less criticism.
“If it’s a room of five people, Anita and Bob are two of them,” said a former White House aide, who asked to remain anonymous because the person was not authorized to speak on the record about White House business.
To get a better sense of Dunn and Bauer’s roles in Biden’s orbit, NBC News spoke with more than a dozen former White House and presidential campaign aides, as well as strategists and former colleagues. In most cases, these people requested their names be withheld — some out of a loyalty to the couple, some for fear of retribution and some because they were not authorized to speak publicly by their employers. The White House declined to comment for this piece.
The documents case has created a series of delicate friction points among the president’s institutional interests, his personal legal interests and the public’s interest in transparency. As his personal lawyer and…
Read the full article here
